The Commune spoke to Jeffery Webber, author of a new book From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia, about the country’s social movements and the course of Evo Morales’ MAS government.
What kind of politics did the 2000-2005 movements in Bolivia express?
The politics articulated through the movements of the 2000-2005 revolutionary epoch in Bolivia are best conceived through what I call the “combined oppositional consciousness” of their leading layers of activists and organisers. This consciousness drew on the two most important popular cultures of resistance and opposition in the last few centuries in the Bolivian context – an eclectic politics of revolutionary Marxism and indigenous liberation. These traditions were adapted and combined – not without tension and contradiction – in novel ways to the twenty-first century environs of urban shantytowns, mining enclaves, and the largely indigenous countryside. Continue reading “from rebellion to reform in bolivia”
